A Couple Rookie Questions

[Blue]

Hello Pros,

First, I’m a Mac user and I have Acorn 7.

I could use some guidance with the following:

1. I somehow disabled my ability to use my trackpad to zoom in/out on an image. I checked Advanced tab in preferences and I don’t have “ignore trackpad zoom and pan gestures” enabled. Any idea how to get my trackpad zoom working?

2. Any idea as to how to batch process layers. I’ve enlarged the canvas for the session but have 60 layers and… don’t want to enlarge all layers one at a time to fit the new larger canvas. There must be a way to increase the size of all layers simultaneously.

3. And lastly, how great a difference does 8 bpc to 16 bpc (deep colour) to 32 bpc (really deep colour) image depth make in the… well… colour, I guess. I’m in quite a bind here as I originally set up an 8 bpc session (which is the default), imported a low resolution photo (no choice, as it was taken as such) applied a bunch of filters to the photo, and then printed the filters to the photo. Then, I started paying more attention to the New Session settings and noticed 16 and 32 bpc. Now, I started a session of 16 bpc and imported the aforementioned treated image from the 8 bpc session. I didn’t see a difference, but A) I don’t know if the image has already been 8 bpc’d and therefore isn’t going to show any improvement when exported from a 16 bpc session, or B) The “deep colour” and “really deep colour” benefits of the 16 and 32 bpc sessions aren’t applicable to my photo (as in… this is a level of colour depth that’s really only detectable by dogs and bees, kind of thing).

OK, please advise where you can.

B

[ccgus]

Hello, and welcome. I’ll answer your questions one at a time below:

@Blue

• I somehow disabled my ability to use my trackpad to zoom in/out on an image. I checked Advanced tab in preferences and I don’t have “ignore trackpad zoom and pan gestures” enabled. Any idea how to get my trackpad zoom working?

I can’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t be working after making sure the Setting is enabled. Does it work correctly in other apps?

@Blue

Any idea as to how to batch process layers. I’ve enlarged the canvas for the session but have 60 layers and… don’t want to enlarge all layers one at a time to fit the new larger canvas. There must be a way to increase the size of all layers simultaneously.

Using the Image ▸ Resize Image… menu item will resize all off the layers at once. What if you did that, and then changed your canvas size after the image resize so everything matches up to how you’d like it?

@Blue

And lastly, how great a difference does 8 bpc to 16 bpc (deep colour) to 32 bpc (really deep colour) image depth make in the… well… colour, I guess

If your source image is 8bpc, I wouldn’t worry about changing it to 16bpc. It does increase the color fidelity, but if you aren’t aware of any problems in that area, you most likely don’t need to worry about it.

Most Mac displays these days can handle 10bpc color, which is awesome to have when you’re shooting photos with a camera that can do 10pbc images combined with a wider gamut. I think all the newest iPhones do this?

There’s sample images out there which you can compare the images side by side to see the wider gamut come through. But again, if your source image is 8bpc, then I’d stay 8bpc.

32bpc is probably only useful for scientific purposes at this point. You can safely ignore it if you’re not sure you need it or not.